A Year Ago Today

I know, I’m tired of this too but I can’t seem to stop my brain from thinking about where I was and what I was doing/going through a year ago in this day and that day and the other day.

Last year I dragged my six days post-surgery body to the county fair. I didn’t ride any rides except the Ferris wheel but I did walk around the place, watched Olivia ride rides with her sister, sat through the band performances and went home and slept as hard as ever.

My hematoma was hard and painful but the incision itself wasn’t too bad. I was bruised and battered and still reeling from the cancer diagnosis.

But I went to that damned fair because I was determined to keep living. I knew the coming months would be hard and I wanted to live. The whole point of treatment, of the surgery, the chemo, the radiation was to live and I didn’t want to put my life on hold while I fought to live.

So we went. And it was fine. I didn’t rupture anything or bleed more. I think getting out of the house that day helped. I didn’t and still don’t want to feel sorry for myself.

Yesterday, we hit up the fair again, this time after work, since…see yesterday’s post. This time, I rode the rides with Olivia while Alyssa hung out with her friends and prepared for her performance with the bands. It was fun.

Liv and I had a blast. We rode the Berry Go Round twice, once in a blueberry and once in a strawberry. After our Berry Go Round rides, we headed to the stands to watch her sister toot her flute. Liv was bored but honestly, so was I. Lyss’s band was the third in six that performed. They were awesome but waiting for her to perform and then sitting through those who performed after was boring. I’m there for my kid, not everyone else’s. I know, bad village mom. Whatever.

After the bands, we got some fair food because, duh. Liv got a cup of fries, I got some chicken tenders to share with her. We shared a Pepsi (isded, as O likes to point out) and I learned that colas still taste nasty.

And you know…if the one lasting effect of chemo (besides the awesome one of no more cancer!) is that I have a weird aftertaste when I drink Pepsi or Coke, well, I’m pretty damned lucky. I avoided the neuropathy. My hair grew back. I’m here. I can forgo colas for the rest of what is hopefully my very long life. I’m healthier for it anyway so I’m going to go have some cotton candy now.

After we ate we headed back to the rides. At first, O and I waited in line for the Ferris wheel. While we waited, they carney dudes let all the riders off and then…one of the dudes, the slightly younger one, grabbed a couple of wrenches and started climbing the wheel. I looked at Olivia and said, “We don’t really want to ride on this thing after he’s ‘fixed’ with a wrench, do we?”

She agreed that it seemed like a bad idea to climb aboard this ride and we headed to the scrambler instead. We both laughed so hard during our first ride as she slid into me over and over again that we decided to ride it again. After that, we were out of tickets and so headed back to the pavilion to find my mom. We were home by 8:45, just in time for Liv to have a shower and get her hair washed. It had been over a week since we’d had softened water. Her hair had been washed several times in that week but with nasty, hard water. It was icky. After her shower her hair felt so much better, as I’m sure, did she.

I’m so very grateful to have this time with my girls. To be able to look back on the past year with gratitude and joy, to know that this fight has been worth it. Even if the fight isn’t over, it’s worth every battle, every journey, every tear for moments like last night.

Fair Day

The girls don't have school today. Every Monday after Labor Day, all schools in Williams County, Ohio, are closed so the kids can go to the county fair. Yay, Fair Day!! There are discounts on wristbands for riding the rides, there are goats, pigs, cows, rabbits, and horses. There is face painting and cotton candy. It's a fun day.

Every year since we've lived here, I've taken the day off to spend with the girls at the fair.

This year, I won't be doing that because I started a new job four weeks ago and I don't have vacation time yet. But it's okay. My mom will be doing the Gram thing and taking Liv to the fair. They will ride the Blueberry ride (it's like the Tea Cups except the cars are shaped like blueberries and strawberries, it's Liv's favorite ride) and they'll buy cotton candy. Because Lyss will probably not be with them, they will not visit the animals because, duh, we all know how Olivia feels about animals.

I will get home at 5:00 and O and I will head back to the fair to watch Alyssa and her band mates perform. This, too, is an annual thing. It will be fun, but don't ask Olivia her opinion because she will declare it is boring. I will bribe her with food.

Last year, I dragged myself to Fair Day even though I was six days post-surgery. It was important that I keep living, keep doing all the things. It's still important but sometimes, life gets in the way of living, you know?

Next year I will have been at my job for a year. Next year I will take Fair Day off and spend with my lovelies. Until then, we'll just keep on keeping on.

Ugh, Football

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I don’t particularly enjoy sporting events. I don’t enjoy participating and I don’t enjoy watching. I will endure a track meet because my child participates and I do enjoy watching her. But high school football games? Save me.

Why do I bother, you ask? Again, it’s because my child is a participant. Not in football, of course. That would just be weird. Though if she wanted to play high school football, I would do what I could to make that happen for her. But that’s a whole other topic.

No, she’s in the marching band and they perform for the pre-game and the halftime at football games. And because of this, I drag my tired butt to the field, a whole three-ish miles away from our house, pay $6 to watch her toot her flute (she actually plays the piccolo during marching band but toot her flute sounds funnier) for five minutes, sit through what is supposed to be twenty minutes of football but is ALWAYS over an hour until halftime and I watch her for another ten minutes.

It’s totally worth the six dollars and the time because it means the world to her. My mom and I are both usually there and we’re both bored out of our minds during the actual playing of the football but we endure because we love Lyss.

Tom loves Lyss too, but he loves being home and excuses himself by insisting that Liv, who hates any sort of extracurricular activity with the heat of a thousand suns, should be able to just stay home and a parent is needed at home with her.

I say she’s old enough to be told, “You’re going, you’re behaving the way you know you should and it will be over before you know it.”

But it’s not the hill I’m willing to die on, so my mom and I go. Liv and Tom stay home and I always “forget” to tell my dad that I won’t be at home on game nights so Tom has to visit with him for the ten minutes it takes to tell my dad I’m not there. Is this cruel and unusual punishment? Maybe, but considering the time I put in at the football game I figure it all evens out in the end.

Meanwhile, Life Keeps Happening

When I’m not sitting around symptom spotting, life goes on. Alyssa has a Homecoming dress, Olivia has homework that needs to be nagged to death in order for it to get done, there are dentists to be seen, the floors need to be mopped and laundry is at a constant level of tragedy.

But seriously, those dentists. Liv has had three appointments in the last six weeks with her dentist (yes, the girls each have their own dentist…what do you mean your kids don’t see different dentists?) The first visit was to have five baby teeth pulled in preparation of orthodontics which may or may not happen in the next year or so. The second was a cleaning that was a couple of months overdue. This last one, that took place on Wednesday, was to put sealants on some grooves she has in order to prevent future cavities.

Yes, Liv’s dentist loves us.

Speaking of people who love Olivia, I got an email from her teacher the other day. I suppose this is a record. It’s the first email of the school year and we’re four whole weeks in.

Her teacher was sharing her concerns that Liv isn’t working independently on things like spelling and reading. These are subjects that are usually fairly easy for Olivia, so when she’s fighting even those, we worry.

I talked to O myself, trying to figure out what’s up with her. It’s like pulling teeth to get answers from her. She shrugged and said, “Spelling is boring. I read the book my teacher told me to read but I didn’t like it, so I didn’t read it all.”

Yeah, she’s a stubborn little wretch. She’s also smart enough to just stare blankly at her teachers and aides and that sometimes gets her out of doing the work…at school. Sadly for me, that means the work gets sent home where I have to badger her sometimes to the point of tears to get the work done. Sigh.

This girl…she just wants to do what she wants to do. Why are all the adults in her life so obsessed with things like reading, math and spelling? Life would be so perfect for her it we’d all just shut up and let her watch YouTube and play games on her tablet.

Alas, we’re evil and want her to be able to do basic addition and subtraction. We also think she should be able to tell time using an analog clock. There’s also that whole reading comprehension thing. YouTube comments doesn’t count when it comes to daily reading requirements. Damn it.

Nothing

Anyone who has any sort of health crisis, whether acute or chronic, knows that once something serious happens, it’s hard to get back to the point where ‘it’s’ nothing. It’s always nothing, until it’s something.

And once something occurs, you’re never comfortable accepting that ‘it’s probably nothing.’

Yet, it really might be nothing.

Except when it’s something.

Honestly, nothing is going on with me. I’m fine. I just think about all that could be happening inside my body now that I’m six months out from chemo and all the poison is probably out of my system. As long as the chemo was still coursing through my veins, I could take comfort in knowing it was killing any residual cancer cells that might be thinking about growing again. But…the chemo is gone. And cancer grew once. Why should I believe that it won’t grow again?

I know these are the ramblings of the paranoid. I know this. I should trust my doctors and know that they’ll keep an eye on me.

But only I am there at midnight when Leftie is feeling weird. I’m the only one who aches from not being active enough and yet wonders if maybe those aches mean more than just getting older and being fat and lazy. I am the only one there to think about my girls and how no one, not even their lovely father, will ever love them like I do and what if the cancer comes back and we don’t catch it in time and I lose this battle that started last year? My doctors aren’t here every minute of every day. And honestly, I don’t want to bother with them with things that are probably nothing.

Except they might be something. And since I’ve experienced ‘something’ I worry.

Maybe I need to see a therapist. Maybe I have PSTD from everything that’s happened in the past year.

Maybe I need to just chill and be grateful that I am still here and know that if there is more to this battle, I will fight it with everything I have, until I have nothing left, if necessary.

Anniversaries

All the dates of the past year, the day I got my diagnosis, the day of my surgery, my first chemo, the day I started full-time medical leave, my last chemo, my last radiation, those dates are all rolling around in my head.

Of course they are. They signify when my life drastically changed. And yet, here I am, a year to the day after surgery to remove that 7/10 inch tumor. The surgery that left me free of cancer but with a hematoma that was huge and painful and lead to another surgery five weeks later to remove it.

I’m good.

I’m also changed from who I was a year ago. Who wouldn’t be, right?

I’m so tired of thinking about cancer. I’m so tired of wondering if the heaviness of my left breast is just remnants of surgery and radiation or if it’s something else, something more ominous.

There have been times in the past couple of months where I wish I’d just had a mastectomy instead of a lumpectomy. If I’d had all of Leftie removed, well, if there’s no breast tissue, there’s no chance for the cancer to come back in that area.

I don’t know.

It’s a weird place to be. I’m healthy…except if I’m not.

Each date that comes and goes is a good one. It means I’m still here, still checking off the days, still doing homework with Liv and going dress shopping with Lyss. I’m still figuring it all out but am grateful that I get to do that. The alternative is unacceptable and yet very much there, on the fringes of my life, reminding me that I’m lucky but I might not always be.

Dresses

There's this little used dress shop in a town about forty minutes north of us. We've been there a few times over the past few years, looking for dressed for Lyss to wear to dances. We found a dress for the Jr High formal when she was in eighth grade. We found her dress for last year's Homecoming dance as well as prom. See, I told her last year that when she's a junior and a senior, I will be willing to pay full price for prom dresses but as freshman and a sophomore? Nope, not going to fork over hundreds of dollars for dresses she will wear one time. I suppose I'm mean but, well, it's a valuable lesson, right? Right.

Yesterday we headed up to visit Sassy's Closet again, hoping to find something for her for this year's Homecoming dance. It's in October, so I thought we were getting a jump on things.

We pulled into the parking lot and saw the sign that stated that Sassy's closet is going out of business. Huh. Well, then.

We went in and started looking through the racks. Alyssa announced she'd seen every dress hanging there.

Olivia hadn't seen them all, though. She found a beautiful periwinkle dress that is very much in the shape of a mermaid. She asked if she could try it on. I knew the style was too mature for her but figured it couldn't hurt.

She looked adorable in it but it was a little big and way too long. It was also very much too mature. Alyssa, though, once seeing this dress on her sister, decided that perhaps she should try it on too.

While Lyss was trying on what we dubbed the Mermaid dress, Liv found a bubblegum pink dress that she declared would be the perfect dress for her to wear for Halloween as Barbie. She asked if she could try this one on too.

I knew the pink dress would be too big too but my mom is excellent with a sewing machine so we took a chance. She was ecstatic. It was so perfectly Barbie pink.

Yes, again the dress was too big but not so much that it will look weird if my mom takes it in a bit. She will also add straps to it to make it more comfortable for Liv.

We left that shop without a Homecoming dress. But we didn't leave without a dress at all. We walked out with Alyssa's prom dress for this year's prom and with Olivia's Halloween dress.

I'm not posting a picture of Lyss in her dress, for fear her date will read this and see it before the big night. But here is Olivia in her Barbie dress. She's in love.